The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, so you’ve been nominated for an Oscar, what do you do next, how do you translate this attention and heat into that next project, and hopefully into a career? To help us answer this question, we are joined today by a writer-director pair facing this exact dilemma. Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh are a writer-director pair whose short film Two People Exchanging Saliva has racked up a bunch of awards, including an Oscar nomination. Welcome and congratulations.
Natalie Musteata: Thank you so much.
Alexandre Singh: Thank you so much, John.
Natalie: Thank you.
John: We should say you actually are Scriptnotes listeners, so this is not a strange place for you to show up.
Natalie: Not at all. This is actually the first podcast for screenwriting that we ever listened to. It was 10 years ago. Alex and I, we come from the visual arts, and all we ever did was talk about film. Alex suggested, “Rather than talking about film or writing about film, why don’t we try and make films?” which I thought was audacious, as two people that had never been to film school and knew absolutely no one in the film industry.
Alexandre: This is a full-circle moment for us because, quite often in the podcast, we’re talking about emerging filmmakers, emerging screenwriters, regardless of how old they are, were coming from careers in visual arts, and then everybody dreaming of making films. Coming up in an age when you don’t have to go to film school, there’s so much that you can learn from podcasts, from YouTube videos, and of course by putting word to the page and making scripts that are not so great to begin with, and hopefully, get better as you learn the craft.
Natalie: We certainly wrote a few scripts with passive protagonists, [laughter] like everyone does at the beginning.
Alexandre: I would say there’s so many things that you learn over the 10 years of going from zero to wherever we are as writers. The thing I would tattoo on my arm is beware of reactive protagonists. That’s just the biggest lesson I would say. Then everything else is all details.
John: I want to talk about those 10 years behind you, but also the 10 years ahead of you, because I really want to focus on what do you do now. In many ways, you’ve achieved the dream, you got this Oscar nomination, you have heat, you have all these meetings, you’ve signed with an agency, all these things, but there’s lessons to learn, and there’s also decisions to make. I want to talk this through while there are live, active questions for you guys. I want to talk to you about your decision to make this film, but also how anyone listening to this, whether or not they are nominated for an Oscar, they’re going to have moments of heat. Some producer read their thing and liked their thing, and it’s getting passed around. How do you capitalize on that?
What I think you guys have done so well is capitalize on the heat that happens before everything happens, and coming in with a plan for what’s next, and also some flexibility. I want to talk through all that, but also for a bonus segment for premium members, I’d love to talk about black and white, [laughter] because you made the decision to shoot this in black and white, and it was such a smart choice. I just want to talk about making a black and white film in 2025/2026, because it helps, and it was the right choice.
Natalie: Yes. I think that in general, we really leaned into bold decision-making. Making the film black and white was a really easy, early decision that we made. We love black and white films. For us, black and white feels like an X-ray. It’s the essential of the image, and it reduces all the noise.
Alexandre: Color distracts. We’re on the radio, but here we’re surrounded by colorful wires, a colorful table.
John: Trust me, we considered making this podcast in black and white [laughter] for just those reasons. In the bonus segment, we’ll get deep into the black and white. I want to talk about now your short film.
Let’s talk about maybe not the last 10 years, but at least the decision to go in and make this specific film. Before this point, you’ve written some things, you did a short film, which got some attention and got some awards. The decision to make this specific film, what was the ambition, what was the goal? You want to tell a great story, you want to make a great film, but I think you also want to make a film that would attract attention and showcase things you’re really good at.
Natalie: Ironically, yes.
Alexandre: This is something we’ve been thinking a lot about. When we made our first film, we had never been on a set before. The very first moment when we had the first short, which was inspired by the opening shot of Rear Window, needless to say, overly ambitious, using a gimbal, we learned, for example, that changing lenses on a film camera takes much longer than on a photo camera. When your DP says, our DP on our first short, Antonio Paladino says, “Yes, we’ll shoot on vintage glass,” vintage glass is wonderful, but the gears for the follow focus are not in the same places. We were learning on the fly. Our ambition at that point was just to make our film. Would it cut together? Would it be a story? Would it be engaging? Would we–
Natalie: That being said, whenever you’re making anything, especially when you’re finally achieving a dream of making a film, the ambition is great. You’re like, “We’re going to go to Cannes. We’re going to travel far with this film.” We did not see the pandemic coming, which is right around the time that first short came out. That being said, with this short, we had learned a big lesson from the first to the second. One was that while we did make a film that cut together and was really fun and playful and visually sumptuous, it did not do the one thing that we care about most in cinema, which is the element of catharsis and telling an emotional story that’s very character-led. That was something that was really important for us to have in this short.
With this short, we had no ulterior motive. We didn’t know whether we were making it for a museum or for film festivals. We certainly were not projecting far into the future at all.
Alexandre: We weren’t thinking about the short as a stepping stone. We weren’t thinking about the short as a proof of concept. Otherwise, we would not have made it 36 minutes long.
John: Yes, it’s a long short. [laughter] I’m going to put a link in the show notes to The New Yorker is hosting it now, which is great, because when I saw it, I saw it as a Vimeo link, but now everyone can see it through The New Yorker. The very short description, I’ll say, is that it’s a film that takes place in Paris in a society where kissing is forbidden. People pay for things with slaps to the face, a very high concept. We meet this unhappy housewife who becomes fascinated by this salesgirl, and it raises the suspicions of a jealous colleague. That’s to set up what it feels like.
It’s in black and white. It is gorgeous and sumptuous. This department store is incredible. The fashion, the costumes, everything is really elaborate and beyond what you would expect to see in a short film. How early in the process of thinking about doing this piece, instead of it might even be a museum piece, which is so fascinating, I would never even consider that– Of course, that short film is made from museum pieces. How early in the conception of it did you know what you wanted it to look like, feel like, what the experience of the film should be like?
Natalie: We knew very early on because we wrote it very quickly. It’s the fastest thing we’ve ever written. We wrote it in two to three weeks. We shared the first draft, and immediately it was greenlit, which was a huge surprise.
Alexandre: A surprise to us.
John: Greenlit by whom? Who was putting this money?
Natalie: Our producers. The film actually originated out of a constraint, which is that we were asked by these producers, whose company is called MISIA FILMS in Paris, whether we had any ideas set in a luxury department store.
John: Oh my God. Great.
Natalie: We would have never written a film that was set in such a luxurious and impossible-to-access space. We had this unusual playing field. We were like, “Okay, if we’re going to set a film in this very loaded environment where you have the intersection of beauty and commerce and power and social status, how do we subvert this space?” It was in–
Alexandre: How do we put a stamp on it? It was during the Zoom meeting when we were asked, “Go away and think about this.” During the Zoom meeting, we were spitballing ideas. This image came into my mind of someone being slapped in the face and someone counting it out, and that being the form of transaction. Even if that was something that we couldn’t verbally articulate at that time, we knew that there was some thematic juice there. They very kindly didn’t shut this down immediately and asked us to go away and think about this world. It was–
Natalie: Then we started exploring what that would mean. There were a lot of news stories at the time, like today, that were influencing our creative– I don’t know.
Alexandre: Whether we were responding to either laughing or fuming at whilst reading the news, at the time, it was the nascent MAGA days of Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, there was the protest movement in Iran, Woman, Life, Freedom.
Natalie: All of which is still happening today.
Alexandre: That has been dialed up to 11 today.
Natalie: Part of it for me was also that when you open up your phone today, if you are opening up Instagram, for instance, side by side, you’re being confronted with images of civil unrest and then an advertisement for a luxury handbag. There’s this normalization of violence side by side with commerce that just, I don’t know, felt like it was related to this idea that had come about almost subconsciously. We started developing the film. Very quickly, this yin and yang idea came about, if violence is normalized, then intimacy is not. The love story within this absurdist world started to come about.
Alexandre: We started to become very attached to these characters. Actually, all three of them. Malaise, who’s the young woman who decides to play a game with Angine, an older shopper, pretends that she knows her already. Their antagonist is Petulante, who is a saleswoman who’s been at the store for a long time and feels not just professional jealousy, but perhaps romantic jealousy or just the desire to be touched.
Natalie: It’s a story of three different women from three different generations who are responding to the repressive rules of the society in very different ways, and their differences that lead to the drama of the film.
John: I want to leave it to listeners to watch the film. Then, if you want to read the scripts, you can read the script in English and in French. The French one does not very closely match the English one because things changed along the way.
Natalie: We were rewriting the script as we were shooting. Then, even in the edit, obviously, scenes shifted around. Then some things were cut.
Alexandre: As Victor was saying recently on the podcast, you go into at best, hopefully, the script is 90% there. As much as we want to really labor over the script and have it be perfect because it is the foundation of the house that you’re going to build, sometimes you’re building that car as you are driving it. This was very much the case with this film because we knew we had to shoot in a window before the Christmas sales in the department store. It was the only time where we could shoot four or five nights in a row.
John: Which actual store is it?
Alexandre: The name is Galeries Lafayette. It’s an iconic.
John: I’ve heard of Galeries Lafayette, but I didn’t recognize it.
Natalie: There are two locations. We shot on the one on the Champs-Élysées. We shot in both. We mix and match. The majority of it is the smaller of the two stores, which is on the Champs-Élysées. As you can imagine, it’s open every day of the week. We’re shooting in the middle of the night.
Alexandre: In the same way that sometimes when you write a text, and you need to see it afresh, you print it out or you change font, with all these tricks, imagine that you write in English, and then you rewrite the dialogue in French. That’s a real seeing it afresh.
Natalie: Alex was born in France. My family’s from Armenia. They went to France in exile. I grew up with the two languages. That being said, we live in America. Our French is very, very good, but-
Alexandre: It’s different.
Natalie: -it’s different.
Alexandre: It’s not the natural thing to write in.
Natalie: There was a moment where we wrote something, and it turned out to be not–
Alexandre: It’s a sexual innuendo that we did not know.
Natalie: Did not mean what we thought it meant.
John: Didn’t [inaudible 00:11:56]
Alexandre: Yes.
[laughter]
John: You won’t have heard the episode yet, but Joachim Trier came on the podcast-
Natalie: Oh, amazing.
Alexandre: Oh, wow.
John: -to talk about Sentimental Value. His script was written in Norwegian, but with a lot of English in it. Then, of course, there’s also an English script, which is an important part of the process along the way. For your script, you’re writing this in English. Then, were your French producers reading the English version or reading your French version, or both? How did that work?
Natalie: Oh, that’s a good question.
Alexandre: We were translating it with every draft. People complain sometimes about making documents. Well, imagine that you have to make all your pictures, all your treatments, all your scripts, and then each time update them in each language.
Natalie: At a certain point, we stopped writing in English, and we were just writing in French.
Alexandre: Once we locked pages, we were in French, and we just concentrated on that script. Then, as Natalie says, we were rewriting during rehearsal, we would rewrite on set, we would rewrite the voiceover.
Natalie: Some of this, you can see on our Instagram page. We did a video where we compared one of our main actresses’ audition with the actual film. You can see the dialogue has changed. We’re not tied to the words. It’s the sentiment that counts.
Alexandre: I would say, for example, probably the best thing we did in this entire process was choosing the title of our film, because choosing the title of a film costs you zero, nothing. Having a distinctive title– Our first film was titled The Appointment.
Natalie: Too general.
John: Too general.
Natalie: Too general.
Alexandre: Too general.
Natalie: We realized almost immediately. It was too late. We thought of the right title very quickly, but yes, it was already out in the world.
Alexandre: When we came up with this title, there was a lot of pushback, not just from our producers who thought, “Oh, it sounds good in English, but it’s ugly in French.”
Natalie: Then our American friends were like, “It sounds great in French, but it’s really ugly in English.”
John: It’s distinctive. I remember when it crossed my email inbox, I was like, “Oh,” I recognized it’s stuck in my head.
Natalie: It’s also just, for us, tonally appropriate. It describes a romantic act, but in a very clinical, absurdist way. That is the tone of the film. It is at once romantic and absurd. For us, it just made so much sense. In general, my biggest piece of advice for anyone making anything is, “Do not dull the edges.”
Alexandre: Be a bit spikey.
Natalie: Yes. Also, make those bold decisions. It’s important to really stick to your gut and do the thing that you want to make and not constantly pander to everyone’s opinion.
Alexandre: You can’t make everybody happy. In this day and age, you need to make a subsection of your audience just effing love your film, and some people are not going to like it, and that’s how things are.
John: All right. The short exists. It’s wonderful. Congratulations on it. I really want to focus on you have a short, what do you do with the short? You say you have these French producers, you have a way to make this thing, but you’re going to have this short film. When did you know what the plan was, what festivals to go to, how to launch this into the world?
Alexandre: This is the paradoxical thing I wanted to say. With our first short, we had perhaps the naive ambition that this would be our ticket to the professional world. It came out in March 2020 on the festival circuit. We met zero people. It did nothing for our careers whatsoever. In some ways, we had a– what’s the expression, the Irish expression, a lonergan?
John: A mulligan, yes.
Alexandre: A mulligan. A Kenneth Lonergan.
[laughter]
John: A Kenneth Lonergan to mulligan, yes.
Alexandre: We made this film with no ulterior motive whatsoever. I think, paradoxically, that is its strength. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It switches perspectives between not just two characters, but actually briefly three characters, something that’s not even advisable to do in a feature film. In that sense, there was no plan whatsoever. We just poured our sincere artistic and creative ideas into the film. Then, after having made it, thought, “Oh bleep, what are we going to do?” because no sales agent would take it. There were very few festivals that we could apply to.
Natalie: Especially in Europe. It’s a European film. The duration limits for shorts on the festival circuit are determined by the awards. In the US, it’s 40 minutes because that is what the Academy Awards deems a short film. In Europe, it’s 30 minutes because that’s what the European Awards deems a short film. As a 36-minute film, we were not eligible for 90% of film festivals. We didn’t even know shorts distributors were a thing.
John: Tell me, to what degree are they a thing? I don’t have a good sense of what the distribution mechanism really is. I know The New Yorker because The New Yorker has good ones, but tell me what you found.
Alexandre: There is a wonderful, rich world of short filmmaking that is centered around mostly more international festivals. The number one festival for international short films is called Clermont-Ferrand. It is happening right now in Clermont-Ferrand in France. It’s described as the Cannes of short films.
Natalie: Honestly, we had heard of it, and we knew its reputation, but until you experience it, you can’t imagine the quality and the care that is put into this film festival. For instance, it’s the only film festival in the world where, between shorts, they bring up the lights. It’s like a palate cleanser. They tell you, this is a moment of respite, and then–
Alexandre: They change the Dolby level for each film. It’s very, very carefully thought out.
Natalie: The cinemas are enormous. The smallest is 300 seats, and the largest is 1500. You’re playing every day for 10 days in amphitheaters, and every screening is sold out. We played on a Monday at 9:00 AM once. I was like, “Alex, prepare yourself. The weekend screenings were full, but who is going to come to this 700-person cinema at 9:00 AM on a Monday? It was full.
Alexandre: This is the Sundance and Cannes of short films. There are short film distributors there who distribute the films for French and German television channels. They are trying to sell on all different kinds of platforms.
Natalie: Yes, including Criterion, MUBI, Netflix. They’re pitching these things to everyone, but it is primarily a European market, I would say.
Alexandre: It is rare for a short film to get enormous visibility. The Oscar shortlist and Oscar nomination is a type of visibility that is incomparable to the amount of eyeballs at these kind of events.
John: Was Clermont your first festival you debuted in?
Natalie: No. We debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2024, which was, again, something that had been recommended to us. It felt like a pipe dream because they only take five to seven shorts.
Alexandre: Seven. Seven shorts.
John: Wow.
Natalie: Seven shorts. They’re one of the few film festivals that’ll take a short up to 60 minutes. In that sense, we were like, “Well, we have to try.”
Alexandre: If any of your listeners are wondering, did we have an in? Yes, there are ways to get into these festivals, but that is very much the exception. We applied on the website. We sent in our little fee, as we did for all of the festivals, and we got in blind.
Natalie: Yes. We really didn’t expect to get in, so much so that we went on vacation, not having finished the film, because we were so sure that it was an impossibility. Day 1 of our vacation, we find out that we’re in, and the festival’s in four weeks, and we had to cancel our vacation, fly back to New York, finish the film in a rush with our sound designer because we had just started the sound design.
Alexandre: Then at the second festival, we showed out here in Los Angeles, AFI FEST, we won the Grand Jury Prize, which meant that we qualified, too, for the Oscar longlist. We knew almost a year in advance that this was a possibility, and we had a discussion about it, and we felt–
Natalie: We knew it was a possibility, and we prepared over the last year for this journey, were it to happen. That being said, it all felt really like a magical idea, not something that was a reality. No matter how many people told us, “Your film is very good. It could get shortlisted. It could get nominated,” it didn’t feel like a reality until it happened.
John: Telluride, Los Angeles, then you know you’re on the longlist. Then I imagine it becomes easier to get into other festivals because they know what you are.
Alexandre: You would hope so.
John: You would hope so, but [inaudible 00:20:15]
Alexandre: Actually, no. Ironically, the festivals that you think you’re going to get into, you don’t. It’s very hard to predict.
Natalie: Yes, but I would say that our first three festivals were so strong. At Clermont-Ferrand, we won the Audience Prize and the Canal+ Prize, which meant that we had distribution in France and Switzerland and French territories. It was already, for me, such a Cinderella dream-like situation.
Alexandre: That was the beginning of, to get back to your very original question, that was when those conversations that we had even stopped thinking about started to happen. We were approached by international producers asking, “Would you be interested in making this into a feature film?” Those conversations started happening quicker and quicker. More people approached us. We participated in the Square Peg event in October before even making shortlist. Something that we had been listening to for many years on the show about managers and generals and agents that we had always thought, “Oh, we’re just thinking about the craft stuff. That doesn’t really apply to us,” we entered into that world.
Started having meetings in Europe, the UK, and also in Los Angeles and New York with production companies that represent actors, financiers, now also with some of the studios, and learning as we were going along what those meetings were. I think it was a few meetings in before we realized, “Oh, this is a general meeting.”
Natalie: Because we didn’t make this short with any intention of making it into a feature, we did a scriptwriter’s lab in France that’s a little bit like the Sundance of France, called Groupe Ouest. There, we gave ourselves a few weeks or a couple of months to really discover, “Is there a feature in this short? What would it mean to do that? What form does it take?” We gave ourselves the freedom to play again. It was in that process that we found the emotional throughline of what the feature would be.
Alexandre: We also started to develop some of the other ideas that we’d been thinking about, often ideas that had been generated in the last 18 months that were similar to the short and similar to the feature ideas that, on their surface, are absolutely ridiculous, but that we treat quite seriously because, for the characters in these worlds, this is very serious for them. We started to get a sense of what our “voice” is, what it is that we bring to the table, and feeling quite confident about the kind of films that we want to write, the kind of films that we want to make.
To harken back to a previous recent episode, the short at 36 minutes, when we go into meetings, people say to us, “We feel confident that you guys can pull off a feature film.” That’s not always the case with a short, and that is not something we had strategically decided to do. We had done it very sincerely, rather naively, but the end product was that that’s how these meetings have been going.
John: All right. Let’s talk about past success stories, people who’ve transitioned from, “Oh, you got a lot of attention,” and then that short film got them started on a career, and then we can talk about sometimes it doesn’t work, and the decisions that you guys are making that everyone has to make about how to prioritize what to do next and where to put your efforts and energy.
Taika Waititi, Two Cars, One Night, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, 2005. 20 years ago, Taika Waititi got started, went from that to Eagle vs Shark, and lots of other things. Andrea Arnold with Wasp, also 2005. Martin McDonagh, the short film Six Shooter in 2006. Shane Acker had his animated short 9, which became a feature film 9.
Damien Chazelle had Whiplash, the short version of it, which was a proof of concept, which became the film. It’s a short film, but it got attention. Jim Cummings with Thunder Road from Sundance, the Grand Jury Prize. David Sandberg, Lights Out, which started as a short. I always send people to Lights Out because it is just such a great, small, little short concept, and they were able to make the feature version of that.
Those are all great success stories. What’s tougher to find, it’s un-Googleable, is the silent evidence of the people who had really great short films that got attention, they got an Academy Award, then you can look up and say, “What have they been doing since then?” unless you call them up and ask, “What went wrong, or what happened?”
It’s because they were all at this moment that you’re at right now, which is they have the heat, they have the attention, and what do they do next? A little spoiler, you are thinking about a feature version of the short as one of the things?
Natalie: We are, yes. I think that we have the advantage of being slightly older, and having had careers in a different field, and coming to the film industry with our first short, it was quite naively, and now less naively. I think that’s an advantage for us. At the same time, I think one of the reasons that people are very interested in the short, but also in other projects that we’re pitching, is because in this moment, when it’s very difficult to get people, the high concept or more absurdist-leaning films are the ones that are working. That is what comes naturally to us. A lot of our ideas are–
Alexandre: The A24 and Neon things, which they’re a little bit bigger swings.
John: Bigger swings–
Natalie: Also, one of the reasons that we did this shift in our careers was because what we love about cinema is the relationship to the public and to the audience, which is very different than it is in the visual arts. Really, you make an artwork, and you hope that people will have a response to it, but really, there’s no relationship between a painting and an audience in the way that there is in a movie theater.
John: You have very different audiences. You have the random museum goer, but you also have the curation aspect of that, and who are the tastemakers, decision makers? That’s all a very different thing.
Natalie: Yes. The tastemakers in the visual art world are the key to everything, whereas in the film world, the audience is everything. When you’re making a film, you’re entering a contract with the public, and you’re saying, “Over this period of time, whether it’s 36 minutes or 2 hours or 3 1/2 hours, I will take you on a journey, and it will be worth your time and the money that you spend to come here.”
Alexandre: “We will challenge you, we will push you away, we will bring you in, we’ll make you laugh, we’ll make you cry.”
Natalie: We came to it with an incredible amount of generosity towards the audience. “We’re making a weird film, but we’ve made it with a lot of heart.” I think that comes through. It was those things that have made the film very attractive to people, and the fact that we do want to make things that are– Joachim Trier is a perfect example. Recently, he said, “Tenderness is the new punk,” and we could not agree more. For us, a film cannot just be high-concept. It needs to have that emotional heart. It’s those two things in concert with one another that we try to achieve with the short, and that we hope every single feature that hopefully we make in the future will have as well.
John: I want to talk about the feature version of the short, which there’s lots of challenges to do that because the engines are going to be different for that kind of situation. You could approach this as, like Damien Chazelle did with Whiplash, “I have a vision for a feature film, and here’s the short that is a proof of concept that lets me expand into that.” I see so many people who try to do short films that are just shorter versions of their feature film, and they are almost always terrible because they don’t have the engine for a successful short film. They don’t have the setup development payoff, the joke structure that you’d actually need for a short film to work.
In your case, I can’t imagine you actually would have written the feature version of this first. It was just because the short film exists and you actually know the world, and you can think about, “Where does it want to go?” that it makes sense to try to do a feature version of it, knowing that it’s going to be different and it’s not the same thing as it’s going to work in the feature version.
Alexandre: In some ways, we’re adapting a short film that we have seen and loved, and that really spoke to us, and we have ideas about how we would expand that world and what we believe to be the emotional throughline of the story, the vertebra that we would hang the story on, and what the larger engine would be.
John: That’s proof of concept. There’s also, I would say, a proof of execution. You talk, Alexandre, about you realize you have a voice and you have taste. Basically, you have a way of presenting the world. You were saying that tenderness is the new punk. That vision could be applied to a different movie. As you’re having conversations with people or pitching other things that you want to do, if it fits in the same space that they’re seeing from this first film, that’s really helpful. If you were to show up with this short film and say, “I really want to do an animated story about gnomes,” I’m just like, “I’m not so sure.” “I want to do a dark and grungy thing that is completely different than this,” everyone’s like, “That’s not helpful for me. I can’t help you there.”
Natalie: I think that would be really tricky.
Alexandre: One of our strengths is, and this comes from maybe a visual or background, is that we have a lot of ideas all the time. Out of those ideas, many of those ideas are not necessarily in our lane, in our wheelhouse. Sure, we could tell a Sundance coming-of-age story. We have ideas for those kind of stories, but we have enough stories that very much echo the qualities that people have been attracted to in the short. In these meetings and conversations, I think it’s been a very natural fit because the ideas that we’re pitching really resonates with what they’ve seen us execute with the short film.
Natalie: Before, I was talking about cinema-going and how there’s been a decline, and at least studios feel like we need more films like this. It’s also the times that we’re living in. We’re living in a moment where the ridiculous and the horrific are side by side like almost never before, or at least in a while now. I think that there is something about that. There’s a tonal line that we’re constantly–
Alexandre: There’s an urgency that we feel as storytellers that I think the people we’re meeting with are feeling. Our film is not a necessarily political film in a didactic sense. It’s not a PSA at the end where there’s a little chiron that gives you facts that, “In France, many people are put into boxes because they have…” [laughter]
John: It’s absurdist in the way Terry Gilliam films are absurdist. It’s a sense of this is a crazy world, but you can see the clear parallels to Brazil.
Alexandre: As crazy as Brazil is, there are aspects of Brazil that chill us and that have resonances with today. I think often of that scene where it’s Michael Palin who is a torturer and Michael Palin comes out covered in blood, and they have a conversation about their children. That is actually a feeling that inspires our film, that dissonance between the everyday comfort of the society that we’re existing in right now, where I’m drinking some tea, having a wonderful conversation with John in this beautiful location in Los Angeles, meanwhile, we’ve just been experiencing what’s been happening in Minneapolis, in Maine, what is happening in Iran right now. All these things are happening at the same time, and how do we, as human beings, navigate that and find meaning in our lives in these very dissonant moments?
John: You said two or three months before the nominations is really when you actually felt like a change happened, and it was actually very meaningful. When did you recognize that something had shifted? Was it the amount of incoming calls and emails, and you started to have meetings with reps, and figuring out where you wanted to go next? Talk to us about that time and what decisions you had to make.
Alexandre: I would say I had an image that came into my mind around this moment that somewhere on the planet there was a switch and that someone flipped this switch. Suddenly, as in a 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon, we are running after the industry. Suddenly, we exit frame. Suddenly, we’re running back the other way, and they’re running after us. How that happened, what that was, we felt that suddenly there was a switch that flipped.
Natalie: In 24 hours, we met with all the agencies, and not because we had planned it that way. It just happened to be that there was a confluence of events. We were also just out there in the world in a way that we normally aren’t, because as people that come from the arts, we are a little bit more interior-facing. We’re used to being in our little cubby, writing one in front of the other. Suddenly, we were really out in the world showing the film in a very public way. All of that attention– Our trailer had just come out on Deadline, too. Suddenly, there was a flood of emails in our inbox, “We would like to see the-
John: Full short.
Natalie: -full short.” Then meetings started to happen, and everything was one after another. There was a pressure to make a decision right away, which was very stressful. At the same time, now that we have representation, it’s opened so many doors. We really were skeptical. Is this a useful thing? There were some people that were advising us, “Don’t tie yourself down. It’s great to be an independent agent.” As two people that do not come from the film industry, this has been incredibly helpful for us.
Alexandre: We’ve had the experience coming from visual art of being the little engine pushing all those carriages up the hill, raising the money, producing it ourselves, building the sets ourselves.
Natalie: Alex taught himself VFX for this film because we didn’t have the budget.
Alexandre: I did a pre-visualization of the whole film in Blender, so a 3D animation of the film. We’re used to doing everything. I think it’s good to keep having that energy, but all that representation is very additive. Suddenly, you are accelerating. It’s like in Mario Kart when you go with the lines, and suddenly you start to go faster. It increases momentum.
Natalie: There was just so many things that happened all at the same time.
Alexandre: A lot of luck. I think luck is something that we don’t appreciate. So many people are lucky the first time. They begin life, like a game of Monopoly, and they roll double six, and then they roll double six again, and they roll double six again. Suddenly, they’re sitting in, be it a creative field, or they invested in cryptocurrency, or they are the richest man in the world, and they don’t realize that so much of that was luck. We are just as creative and hardworking as so many of our friends, and we just happen to be in the right position at the right time.
That said, we’ve had full careers in the visual arts. This hasn’t happened one week coming out of film school at age 21, but still getting the cast that we got to say yes, shooting the film, and the building not burning down, or no one having a heart attack, or all the things that could go wrong on a film–
John: It’s not just all the things that went right. It’s all the things that could have gone wrong, which somehow you avoided.
Alexandre: Also, the same is true for the life of the film. You get into that festival. It just happens to be, for example, at Telluride, those shorts are selected by Barry Jenkins, who chose our short because he has an affinity for French, black, and white cinema, and then has gone on to support the film. So many of these encounters and things that have happened professionally have been a mixture of luck and our hard work.
Natalie: We find ourselves here today because of a chance encounter.
John: I want to go back because, Drew, can you take a look and figure out when did we first get contacted about this short?
Drew: Good question.
John: Because I know we got it–
Natalie: I’m sure our publicist– [laughs]
John: It was your publicist, because your publicist has been dogged, which is great. It totally makes sense. I was thinking it’s both a fire burns, but also people were scraping sparks there a lot.
Alexandre: Yes, very much so. The publicist was dogged because we said, a year ago, “Oh, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could go on Scriptnotes? It will be a dream come true.”
Natalie: Really, this is where our cinema education begins. For us, this is a dream come true in many ways.
Alexandre: A similar thing happened with Charli XCX, who wrote a review of our film on Letterboxd. Around a year ago, her Letterboxd account was made public. I was watching TikToks where she was talking about a film– I think you recently talked about her Substack on the– I was thinking, “She is really incredible. She has incredible taste. She’s very smart. I think she would really like our film.” We did what anyone would do. We asked, “Does anybody know her neighbors, gardeners, dog walkers?” We went in so many directions. Nothing happened for an entire year. Eventually, our manager said, “Let me just reach out to her agent.”
Natalie: No, it was still like one person led to another person led to another person.
Alexandre: I’m at home flicking through Letterboxd, and I follow Charli. She’s one of my “friends” on Letterboxd. Suddenly, she posts about a film, and it’s our film. I think I jumped off the couch. I was so excited.
John: Did you find the first email?
Drew: December 22nd, 2025.
John: That’s pretty recently. That’s pretty recently. My manager separately had reached out, so that’s another connection. Clearly, he probably had a meeting with you or his company had meetings with you about stuff. Also sent it to me. Then, of course, Matt Byrne, who was my former assistant, had met you randomly at a party and made these connections. We talk on the show so often about, “Do you need to live in Los Angeles? Do you need to live in New York?” No, you don’t, but the fact that you were in New York at the same time there and at a party, just being around people who are doing the thing you can do, leads to the chance of encounters. If you were just in a house in Maine, it would be less likely for that to have happened.
Natalie: For sure. I mean, it’s incredibly helpful being in New York or LA. I mean, we’ve been here quite a bit as a result of all of this. That being said, I think going on the festival journey was also really valuable. That was the first step, really. It’s just making friends in the industry. Not people above you, but that are trying-
Alexandre: Your peers.
Natalie: -to do the exact same thing, that are doing the exact same thing, and really just connecting on a creative level.
Alexandre: We’ve met filmmakers who are the equivalent of someone who lives in the woods in Maine, who then goes on the festival circuit and meets lots of people and then returns home to recharge and doesn’t have to pay New York City rents.
John: There are helpful things about living in the hub of all this stuff. From the podcast, you know that Drew went off and made a short film that he’s now submitting to festivals. He has learned a bunch of stuff. I thought we might learn from what he’s learned and get your feedback on how the experiences overlap.
Drew: It sounds like they already figured it out before. I had to go through a process to figure it out, but I wrote a bunch of stuff as I was going of, “Oh, this is–” and tell me if I’m wrong too on any of this. First one was, part of why the comedy isn’t working is because I’m shooting this like a drama. There’s a difference, and it’s not just letting things live in the wide.
Natalie: Interesting.
John: Do you consider your short a comedy or a drama?
Alexandre: It’s absurdist, but–
Natalie: It’s absurdist. I would say that we categorize it as an absurdist drama, which means that it has–
John: Is it dramedy?
Natalie: I just call it absurdist. It has elements of comedy in it.
Alexandre: Without sounding too highfalutin and egotistical, Shakespeare’s work mixes pathos and bathos, I think, of the Grave Digger scene in Hamlet. Joachim Trier’s work, within the same scene, it’s mixing comedy and serious drama together. As to the question as to whether comedy works more in the wide,– That is–
John: Well, it does, but there’s some ineffable thing that in previous shorts I’d done, it was much funnier, that tended to be the cheaper stuff that I did. Then doing this, and it looks beautiful, and we have all these beautiful lenses, and it feels so heavy. I’m trying to figure out if that’s framing or if that’s light or what it is, but I’m trying to get to the heart of it.
Alexandre: It’s hard to say because sometimes comedy really comes from editing and pacing whereas a joke is about delivery, and that involves cutting and coverage in some ways. Sometimes comedy comes from the awkward and the uncomfortable. I think, for example, of Ruben Östlund’s films where everything is happening on a wide, and this short is going on for a really long time, and I feel really uncomfortable, and the kind of Larry David idea of comedy, the uncomfortable idea of comedy. I think it’s difficult to say without having seen the film which direction something works or doesn’t work in.
John: Let’s talk about during production, you had an idea about takes.
Drew: Oh, yes. I wrote, more takes is actually better. Try letting actors do three or four takes on their own before you start redirecting.
Natalie: I think in an ideal scenario, you have more takes. In our experience, we just never get past take three because we always have to move on.
Alexandre: I have an idea that seven is the perfect amount of takes. The reason being that it takes two or three takes for everyone to just get into the flow of things, get warmed up, as it were.
John: For your DP to stop fiddling with things.
Alexandre: Yes. By four, five, and six, usually you’re going to hit your best, best takes. Then seven is your coverage, or just in case, or just so we all feel like we’ve covered it.
John: Do a weird one.
Alexandre: If you’re going to take nine, 10, 11, or 12, it’s because something isn’t working and that’s no shade on anybody. That’s because either something technically or we haven’t found it yet.
Natalie: That being said, Alex and I, we always do a complete pre-visualization of the film, especially because there are two of us and because we have very little onset experience, we need to have a plan going into the shoot. We cannot show up and just be like, let’s find it. That doesn’t mean we don’t deviate. We do deviate from time to time, but we’re always coming in knowing, okay, we do have a plan that works. There are parts of our film that are a one-to-one replica. I think that preparation is the most valuable thing for us.
John: I want to talk about the pre-visualization for a second too, because the next thing is film a popsicle stick version. What I did is I did a storyboard. That didn’t catch little things of like how long it takes for this person to walk from here to here. I really should have done, and it sounds like Alex, you used Blender, and that was so smart.
Alexandre: I’ve had the experience on our first short of doing storyboards drawn by hand in Photoshop, but it’s real drawing, and then being very reticent to change them because it took me a long time to draw them. Whereas in this pre-visualization, you are able to change shorts very quickly, change the blocking very quickly.
Natalie: It also meant that we could edit them together. First, we scanned all our environments using an app called Polycam, and then we created this 3D model. Then Alex, he would create these little marionettes, and he would put the camera in 30 different places. I would look at him and be like, [crosstalk] this is far too many options because obviously we’re not going to have 30 setups for each of these scenes. Sometimes even within those 30 setups, I’d be like, none of these are right. We would go in, and then we would find what is the most economical and also the best way to tell this particular scene.
Alexandre: One of the things about location scouting that we found quite difficult is that you’ll, on one day and one morning, go visit five locations. You have 20 minutes. Imagine we’re shooting in here, and my immediate thought is, oh, can we get a great wide if we were up there in that corner? Oh, we’re going to have to go get a ladder. There I am with the camera, not really quite comfortable. Whereas we can come in, we can scan it, not knowing whether we’re actually going to shoot in it.
Then as we’re cleaning up the model, I’ll be underneath the table because there was strange little jagged edges. Suddenly I see, oh, there’s a short where I see just John’s foot tapping. Oh, I would never have thought to do this, but this could be an interesting way to begin the scene. There was a lot of the inspiration process happened in the pre-visualization in the same way that as you’re writing, you have those moments in the shower where inspiration arrives, like a little elf suddenly appears on your shoulder. That happens over the weeks, months, days, years of the writing process.
Then also in the pre-production process, you are open to those moments of inspiration, just like as when you’re on set, you have your storyboard. Suddenly in the camera, we had a scene where our character, Angine, is dreaming about the girl she loves, Malice. She imagines herself wearing the iconic geometric black and white dress. As she is walking towards the changing booth, as we’re shooting it on the dolly, the camera suddenly started shifting down, booming by accident, like a mistake. Everybody suddenly stopped and said, that’s the short, this mistake.
That inspiration happened by accident. It’s about being open to all those moments. Maybe the drawn storyboards can, unless you’re Pixar and you’ve had 10 years to storyboard the shit out of this thing.
John: Even Pixar, they animate those things right away. Your last point I want to focus on is to this. It’s hard not to focus on what’s not happening in a take, but I need to figure out how to see what is happening. Here’s what I take from that is that if I’m looking at the monitor, my eye is drawn to everything that’s wrong. I’m trying to fix everything that’s wrong, but it’s hard for me to say, oh, that’s actually really good because you get distracted by all of the errors and it’s so hard to focus in on what’s right.
Natalie: I think the only thing that matters personally is the actor. Everyone that is watching the film is watching it for the first time most of the time. Hopefully, your film is so good that people will watch it a second and third and fourth time. Even when you’re watching it a second time, people just have a way of zeroing in on a person’s face because that is where all of the emotion. That is what they’re reading into.
Alexandre: We have 100 million years of evolution, which involves looking at people with two eyes and a nose and trying to figure out, does this person want to eat me or make love to me? Now they’re being sincere about it. Performance is what we are dialed into. Everything else can fall away. There’s a scene in the Coen brothers’ film Barton Fink where the studio boss, who has been asking him to make this boxing movie and he doesn’t know how to write it, hauls him back in.
In the previous scenes, he’d been so magnanimous and so generous and so like, oh, don’t worry about it. You’re a genius. You’re a New York author. I’m going to support you. He absolutely berates him and destroys him. During that scene, I think he has these lapels because it’s during the Second World War. His lapels are moving around like nobody’s business. It doesn’t matter. The performance is all that matters. I think Walter Murch said the same thing.
Natalie: It’s always the thing that I’m zeroing in on. It’s just like, what is happening on the actor’s face? Is it communicating what this scene is about? Because all the other stuff is noise.
Alexandre: There’s a thing that happens in filmmaking that I’ve rarely heard people talk about publicly, but I think is the most magical and beautiful part of filmmaking. We like to stand very close to the camera lens with those tiny little monitors. Whether we are really receptive to the character and the actor, whatever that thing is, that hybrid of the two, what they’re feeling at that moment. You’re watching the film on that little monitor, and suddenly you know that we have just shifted into the actual film. You just know that this is going to be projected for history.
Natalie: Hopefully.
Alexandre: Frankly, hopefully. For those 10 seconds and then it sort of like drifts away. That is one of the most almost like spiritual moments of filming that is so beautiful.
John: Yes, Drew. I think I would say is that, yes, you’re noticing all the things that aren’t working, but like Alexander is saying, there’s moments where you get that little vibe like, oh, that’s it. That’s it. Every day you’re basically chasing that. There’s times where I was like, I didn’t have that the whole time through, but I have the pieces to get me to that. Then you have to make the choice like, I guess I moved on because I’m going to have to stitch that together in editing.
Drew: I think one thing I was fighting was, so you get in the edit and then you watch a take that when you watched it, you were like, the actor’s not doing the right thing. Then you see like, oh, they’re doing something else that’s actually there’s value to that, of course. Like, oh, shit, I missed this gem that they were bringing and maybe push them away from something that could have been interesting.
John: Because you, you had a vision on your head.
Drew: I was like, yes, the character’s running in this direction. They were like, actually, if we go this path, it’s interesting.
Alexandre: Parathetically, having had not that much experience making films yet, when you’re on set and you’re doing a scene, it’s like play. It’s creative. Even though the clock is ticking and your first AD is hovering there whispering in your ear, you have to pretend like, [crosstalk] to use a cruder analogy, like making love, that you have all the time in the world and that you are completely relaxed and that you are here to play and you are here to play with one another and that your actors are creative collaborators, inspiring partners, and they’re offering ideas and you’re offering ideas back.
There are probably filmmakers who have a global totalitarian vision of what the film is and maybe like Hitchcock, they are manipulating their marionettes. I think you, Akim Trier, and all other great filmmakers have probably said it’s about this exchange and you’re playing tennis with them.
John: We have two listener questions that are surprisingly on topic here. Let’s start with this first one, who’s an Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
Drew: Unwrapped writes, “As a seasoned documentary filmmaker who earned an Oscar nomination in the mid-2010s, I’m struggling to move forward in the industry. I never secured representation after the nod because I was working comfortably in academia and assumed the nomination would keep doors open. Years later, after leaving academia, I found myself an Oscar-nominated filmmaker with a strong but limited body of work, a piece of evergreen IP, no representation, and no clear path into the current marketplace.
Is there any viable route for someone like me to secure representation in a business that now expects new heat, recent sales, or major attachments before anyone will even take a meeting, even though those require representation to achieve in the first place? I’m in a Catch-22.”
John: Here’s a person who was in your place and didn’t capitalize on the moment that things passed by. I think they need to do something new because you can’t rekindle off that older thing.
Natalie: I think you either have to create something new, like another short, unfortunately, that catches fire, or you have to write a feature that is undeniably great. I think that great scripts are hard to come by. I think that people are always searching for that next film that’s going to bring bodies into the theater.
Alexandre: I do have a theory about this topic, which is that the greatest films are made by 19-year-olds who don’t know what they’re doing and are just full of gusto and confidence and 45, 55, 65-year-olds, and I think of Milton writing Paradise Lost in his 80s when he was blind, who just at a certain point give up on trying to play the game. They’ve had enough of trying to write vampire stories because that’s fashionable. They’ve given up on trying to make a new Yellowstone.
They just write the thing that they really care about, paradoxically, that they don’t think will work in the marketplace whatsoever. Those are the kind of ideas that actually really grab people’s attention. It’s hard to say to someone to do that, but just really dig in.
Natalie: I do think it’s really important not to think about what the market wants and to make something that feels very true to yourself.
John: I would say that it feels like the doors are closed, but I think with some new thing, you have an advantage of getting those doors to open up again. If you made a short that you were submitting to things like, oh, you’re the Oscar-winning director of this other thing, they’re going to pay more attention to you, which is good, which is helpful.
Natalie: Yes, absolutely.
Drew: People love comebacks.
John: That’s also nice. Question from Leah.
Drew: Leah writes, I’m directing a short film and have a producer going out with offers to actors. Should we be attaching the script to the offer email or waiting for the agent to respond back and then sending the script to them? I’m not sure if agent emails have filters that put anything in the trash immediately, that has an attachment for someone they don’t know, or if it’s better to save time at the front end of the convo by preemptively sending the script.
John: What did you guys do for your script as you were going out after actors?
Alexandre: I think we always attached it.
Natalie: We always attached it.
Alexandre: It’s not enough time to have that back.
Natalie: The script was what attracted people. I think it’s really always important. People always ask us, how did you get this amazing cast? It’s like, we just asked. You always have to ask. You just never know.
Alexandre: In some ways, people don’t ask them and so they’re flattered. You never know. If they’re not interested, they’re not interested, and you may as well try.
John: It’s a short film also. It’s not secret information. It’s not a huge ask. If they’re curious, they’ll open up the PDF, look through it, and if it’s good, they’ll send it along. I don’t think it’s a problem.
Drew: Did you guys do cover letters to your actors?
Natalie: We did, always. I knew we do cover letters for the smallest thing. I’m like, would you like it?
[laughter]
Alexandre: No, we only wrote it to those actresses and that particular man. I think it’s always good to articulate. We’re not just going out to you because you’re well-known or because you’re a great actor. It’s because something about your work and who you are as a human being, because often, who they are as an artist, is woven into who they are as a human being. It profoundly touches us and connects with us and connects to this story. I think sincerity is a very powerful thing.
Natalie: Yes. The reasons that you want to work with someone should be very specific. We always take the time to articulate what that is and to write something that’s personal because when you’re making art, it is personal.
Alexandre: Can I ask a listener question?
Drew: Please.
[laughter]
Alexandre: I’ve always wanted to write in with a listener question, and this is much easier. Natalie and I have a four-year-old daughter. We have careers. I’m a visual artist. Natalie is an art historian. Those things have really been on the back burner whilst we were making this film, and specifically when we were making this campaign. Every week, I listen into a podcast, and I hear John and Craig talk about– I know John has Highland Software. He is making games. He’s also writing young adult fiction, and he’s also playing D&D on Sundays or-
John: Thursdays, yes.
Alexandre: On Thursdays, and also playing some video games.
John: Rarely, but occasionally, yes.
Alexandre: Then he’s also writing great feature film scripts, and then apparently also does a podcast, I’ve heard, as well. Where is this magic time machine where you are using– are your days 28, 32 hours long rather than 24?
John: No, it did– Drew, maybe you can help out.
Drew: I also have this question. I’m around John more than anyone else in my life.
John: I get a lot done, for sure. If I write two hours a day, that’s great. I get a lot done, but there’s a lot of other stuff I want to do, and I just find ways to do it. Also, I think I’m really good at recognizing the common patterns between things. The software stuff isn’t really that different than the filmmaking stuff I’m doing because I’m using Highland every day to write everything I’m doing. All the other stuff, too.
Drew: You have your to-do lists, which I think helps focus you quite a lot.
John: I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I have my daily list, which I print out a sheet that’s folded in fourths. It’s just what I’m going to do, things I need to do today. It’s a checklist of those things. There’s some stuff that’s pre-printed on there. My Duolingo and my other stuff that’s drastically done every day. I fill that list, and that’s my plan for the day. I get basically everything on that list done every day. That helps a lot. I try to make sure they are very– I’m writing the actual achievable thing that I can do.
That’s the next action aspect of it all. I make a list, and I get the things on the list done. That’s how it gets down to it. You have a four-year-old. Also, it’s recognizing that any plan fails against a child. It’s just like children are– they will take every bit of everything, but they’re also wonderful.
All right, it’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing, keeping with this whole theme, is a short film. It’s a short film called Troy by Mike Donahue. It’s from two years ago, I think. It’s a comedy about this New York couple who become obsessed with their neighbor who is a sex worker. They get too involved in his life.
It’s really well done. It’s a perfect New Yorker short film. It’s exactly what you want from it. The YouTube algorithm just served it to me randomly, so thank you. It’s just really delightfully done. Troy by Mike Donahue. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Natalie, what do you have to share with us?
Natalie: I would like to share the New York Public Library’s picture collection, which is where we begin all of our projects. Oftentimes, even before we know what a story will be or a script will be, we’ll go in. It is a physical place in the New York Public Library on the 42nd Street, 5th Avenue.
Alexandre: The Lions Building.
Natalie: The Lions Building, the iconic building. It’s a room in which there are like-
Alexandre: 2.8 million images that have been cut out of books, newspapers, magazines over the last 50, 60 years. In an age where we are experiencing AI that is regurgitating images and art back to us, making us into Studio Ghibli characters. When visual research sometimes involves just typing in a location or an idea into Google and seeing the first-hand images that come back, which are always going to be the same images. There’s something about the serendipity of going into this place and digging through images that are not online, that are sometimes misclassified, that sometimes have a different image on the backside, and being inspired.
Natalie: Oftentimes, the story will take a turn because of something that we’ve seen in the picture collection. It’s just sort of a magical place for us, so we always come back to it.
John: A question, just because Alexander just completely took over your one cool thing. You’re married, and do you set a time of like, we’re going to stop being our creative selves at a certain point and just be a married couple?
Natalie: No, it’s impossible. Yes. No, I think that’s part of the fun, too. The triumphs we celebrate together, the disappointments we also get to weather together. I can’t really imagine it any other way. It became very obvious very early on that we would make a really good duo because we have the exact same taste and we love the exact same things, but we bring totally different things to the table. It ends up– I always get sad when duos break up because once they do start to make films independently, you can actually see what they brought. You’re like, oh, but you know, it was the combination.
John: Those brothers are so good together.
[laughter]
Alexandre: Which ones? There’s been a few.
John: That’s why I pick brothers. No, not those brothers. Yes.
Natalie: Yes. I feel really grateful that we work together and there are arguments here and there.
John: There’s creative friction.
Natalie: There’s creative friction from time to time, like in any duo. At the same time, I would say 90% of the time we agree, and when we don’t, it’s the detail that no one really cares about but us. That’s part of the fun, too.
Alexandre: Writing and directing requires so many different types of skillsets. You need to be the introverted person sitting in your bathrobe, hunched over a typewriter for months on end in a Los Angeles hotel, and you also need to be the extrovert on the can-read carpet getting your photo taken, wheeling and dealing. Whilst we can have that schizophrenic quality sometimes, it’s much easier if that can be reflected in your creative partnership, obviously the writers, the directors, the producers, all bringing complementary things to the table, but always having the same idea of what film we’re making.
Natalie: I always joke that it’s easier to write together and to work together than it is to parent together. Not because we don’t get along in that either, but just because having a child is just like the ultimate work of art. I’m like, it’s an uncontrollable one with no end. Alex really treated our child for the first three months as a pre-production.
Alexandre: Yes, I’m going to do this, it’s going to be perfect.
Natalie: Then three months in, he’s like, oh my God, this never ends. He’s like, I can’t bring this energy 24-7 forever. It’s all a pleasure, and it’s all part of the magical ride that is living.
John: Alexandra, what’s your wonderful thing?
Alexandre: I did hesitate. For a long time, I thought, maybe my remarkable tablet, which means-
John: Oh, yes, I love those. Talk to me about how you use it.
Alexandre: Actually, that was my not actually wonderful thing, if you allow me. The remarkable tablet is a E-ink display that you can write on that has a very stripped-down interface. I come from the generation of people who wrote in many notebooks with a beautiful fountain pen, and then ended up carrying around seven or eight notebooks and destroying my back. I can use it for writing ideas. For school meetings, whatever it is. It has enough satisfaction. I know Craig has complained about the glassy feel of an iPad. It’s not as beautiful as a fountain pen, but it is still very satisfying.
As someone who will take notes in every meeting, sometimes I won’t even read those notes back, but the act of writing by hand helps the information go into my brain. I’m going to cheat a little bit because actually, this being script notes, I would like to bring to you a game.
John: All right, which is?
Alexandre: I don’t know if you’re familiar with this game. In very long car rides as a child, the only games that I think we had were 20 questions and what am I seeing out the window eyes wide?
John: A hand.
Alexandre: There’s a game that my friend, the novelist Benjamin Hale told me about, which he has deemed stinky pinky, but you may know under a different name. It is a game in which you put together a adjective and a noun, and the answer is something that rhymes. For example, the name of the game is, the explanation. If I was to say to you, smelly finger, you would think about it and say stinky pinky. For example, I can give you a very easy one. Overweight feline.
John: It’s a fat cat.
Alexandre: Exactly. Part of the pleasure is deciphering it, but part of the pleasure is coming up with them. For example, one of my favorites, which is a very hard one, I’ll give it to you, but with no expectation that you’ll get it, is dashing pirate.
John: All right a-
Alexandre: This is the hardest one I’ve ever come up with. It’s debonair corsair.
John: Debonair corsair. Very nice.
Alexandre: The clue, this involves French. False enemy.
John: Faux foe.
Alexandre: Yes. Isn’t this a fun game?
John: Yes, it’s a fun game.
Alexandre: The great thing is it’s great for car rides. It’s great for airports if you’re into puzzles. You can play with your children and set easier ones. You can come up with devilishly difficult ones.
John: It’s also very Craig, so he will enjoy it.
Alexandre: I think he might enjoy it. Stinky pinky.
John: That is our show for this week. Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Thank you to John Pope, our DP for this episode. We’re trying this out on video. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books.
You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube to search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today. In the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Are you guys premium subscribers?
Natalie: We are. Yes. Yes, I think so. All right.
John: You get the bonus segment, so you’re familiar with it. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on black and white. Natalie and Alexandra, thank you so much. Congratulations.
Natalie: Thank you so much. This is such a pleasure.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. Your film is released in black and white. Talk to me about when the decision was to do this in black and white. Were you black and white on the set? I assume you shoot color and then color time it down to black and white. Talk to us about all the decisions to do black and white.
Natalie: It was a really early decision. Part of it was that we just didn’t have control over the store. We’re shooting between midnight and 6:00 AM. The store had unusually long hours. It would be open at 9:00 AM and close at 9:00 PM. We would rush in the doors. We would have to have an hour-long break at 3:00 AM for lunch. All of which is to say we had very little time. In the morning, everything had to go back to normal. We were always choosing very carefully where are we placing our camera. By turning the film in black and white, we were imposing our own artistic aesthetic onto the store.
Alexandre: We knew that even before we visited the location. We’d been thinking about the Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire, which is mostly in black and white with some sections in color. That film has an iconic library, which I’d always been fascinated by. We’d spent a lot of time on Google checking out this library in real life. In color, I think the carpet is orange. You have all the colors of the sleeves of the books. It doesn’t have that-
John: Color’s distracting, yes.
Alexandre: It’s distracting. It doesn’t have that simplicity. We came to realize that black and white is a little bit like an x-ray. It shows you how things really are. Color distracts. That made sense in a society where the film is about observing and being observed. It’s a society in which joy and intimacy has been sucked out of the frame and where smell is actually an important component. Smell is very difficult to communicate in cinema. We thought that perhaps in the same way that when you remove one of the Senses, other sensors become heightened, that perhaps the black and white could-
Natalie: I’m not sure but it’s an idea.
Alexandre: It’s a theoretical idea.
Natalie: It also, someone commented the other day that the film is like boxes upon boxes upon boxes. By reducing the film to black and white, you really see the geometry, the lines of the store accentuated and then reverberated in the coffin, cardboard boxes.
Alexandre: Black and white is very compositional. When we draw storyboards, we draw in black and white. When I think of the end scene of our film, it involves a character of Malaise being viewed as a shadow on a wall. There’s almost a relationship to film noir there. There is something very graphical and compositional about black and white that is very attractive.
Natalie: It also allowed us to distance ourselves a little bit from our own world.
John: The time period of this. I say we’re in Paris, but it’s not our Paris. It’s not what we’re familiar with. It’s not clear exactly what era we’re in. It’s like-
Natalie: I think you said there are cell phones and iPads.
John: There are cell phones. They have technologies, but it’s clearly not the same system. The cash registers don’t work the same because it’s all about slaps. It’s a heightened world. The black and white also helps you with the sense like this is heightened. This is not realism as you’re expecting.
Alexandre: It helps with the tonal questions. Tone was very important and one of the hardest things in the writing and execution of this film. This film doesn’t take place in a world where three weeks ago there was a virus that escaped from a lab and suddenly everybody started slapping each other in the face. It’s not science fiction. It’s not what the world could become.
Tonally, it’s absurd in the sense that it’s meant to be in the sense that our world is already absurd. The things that contributed to that were, for example, the names of the characters. The characters are not named Jack and Sally. They’re called Malaise and Longy.
Natalie: This is also one of the reasons why we felt really strongly that the film should have a narrator because the narrator isn’t there to give away any information. You take out the narrator and you still understand what is happening in this world and who these characters are, but the narrator is there for the tone.
John: Make it the fable of it all.
Natalie: Yes, the fable. Exactly.
John: On set, back to the black and white, were you looking at monitors that were just black and white so you could have a sense of what that was? I feel that would be really confusing if you weren’t looking at that final.
Natalie: Yes, it was also something we were talking about with our costume designer because obviously different shades, different colors, you need that contrast and it’s not immediately obvious which colors will create that contrast.
Alexandre: To get very technical and geeky, maybe too technical and geeky, but this is a film podcast.
John: Let’s do it.
Alexandre: There is an option now to actually shoot native black and white on, say, an ARRI camera by removing the Bayer sensor colors, which gives you, I think, maybe a stop or maybe two stops of extra light and locks in your decision to shoot in black and white. However, it does make the grading a little bit more difficult and it definitely makes VFX and cleanup work more difficult because there’s less information to grab onto.
John: If you had grid screens to replace, for example, you don’t have a grid anymore.
Alexandre: Or even just tracking an object for information is very helpful.
John: You did not do that?
Natalie: No. We did shoot in color but we were always looking at a black and white. Obviously, it’s essential in the black and white dress that is at the core of the story.
Alexandre: Black and white is very much about surfaces, about textures, about reflections, about metallic. It’s about mirrors. We made a decision in the film to always have a mirror in every scene, so the camera’s either shooting into a mirror or a character’s looking at a mirror. That’s something that worked really well in black and white. It’s a very silvery kind of-.
Natalie: Then there are so many black and white films that we love. Not just older black and white films, but contemporary black and white films like the films of Pavel Pavlovsky, Ida, Cold War, and even Frances Ha, or The Lighthouse. Actually, when we made this, we didn’t realize how controversial it is to shoot in black and white. It’s one thing for a short, because obviously, the market is different, and the market barely exists for shorts. In a feature, we imagine that this film will still be in black and white, and it’s definitely something that we’re going to stick to, but it’s a hard sell because there are certain countries that will not distribute a black and white movie.
John: Frankenweenie is one of the last black and white studio films to be released, and it was a real problem. The kids, for the first time, they thought it was cool because they just had never seen black and white before.
Natalie: We like to joke because everyone always asks us, why did you make this film in black and white? We want to ask the opposite question, which is like, why did you choose color? Color is so much harder than black and white. It’s just, I don’t know, there’s something so seductive about a black and white image.
Alexandre: The rules that we’re imposing on film are kind of rules from the 70s and 80s when color film was great and black and white felt nostalgic. Anything that can make a film stand out is a plus.
John: All right. Congratulations again.
Alexandre: Thank you.
Links:
- Two People Exchanging Saliva
- Taika Waititi’s Two Cars One Night
- Andrea Arnold’s Wasp
- Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter
- Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash short film
- Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road short film
- David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out short
- Troy by Mike Donahue
- The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection
- ReMarkable tablet
- Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our Director of Photography is Jonathan Pope.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.